Captain Samuel C. Stalnaker

Samuel Stalnaker was born before 1700 and died in 1769. He was living in Augusta County VA in April 1748. He was captured by Indians June 18, 1755 and his wife and son Adam were killed. He escaped from the Indians and was referred to as "Capt. Stalnaker" in a September 8, 1756 letter from Governor Dinwiddie to Colonel Clement Reed in which he instructed Colonel Reed to "Give Stalnaker 100 pounds to quailfy him to raise his Company and Build a stockade fort and Drapers Meadow. This fort was located at Smithfield, Montgomery County VA.

Known children of Samuel Stalnaker:

1. Jacob b.c. 1710 d. 1792; m.Elizabeth Truby
2. Adam d. 1755; Killed by Indians

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Excerpt from the Paulsen Family Tree on Ancestry:

On June 18, 1755 -- a month before Braddock’s Defeat -- Indians attacked Samuel Stalnaker’s settlement on Holston River (Chilhowie, Va.), capturing Stalnaker, his wife and son Adam, along with Samuel Hydon, Matthias Counie, and a servant man. They executed all save Stalnaker and Hydon. Stalnaker’s mother and four children were in another building when the Indians rushed the house, and got away by hiding in a “Rye Patch.”

The Indians marched the prisoners to “Ouabach Fort” before taking Stalnaker to “the Shawnese Towns.” On April 10, 1756 he escaped and traveled for two months, three hundred miles to Virginia’s “Back Settlements.” In Williamsburg he apprised the governor that “on the evening before he made his escape, 1,000 Indians and six French officers came to the Shawnese Town, destined for fort Du Quesne, to wait there some time to see whether any attempt would be made upon it, and if not, to disperse themselves, and fall upon the Frontiers of Virginia and Pennsylvania ...”

From this first attack until 1760 settlers at the edge of the frontier lived from April to October of each year in log hovels that formed stockade walls and worked their crops under armed guard. Those who couldn’t abide the crowding, the stench of excrement, the swarms of flies, and chose to live outside, risked instant death and maybe torture. Sometimes Native warriors spared young men and women to be adopted in place of lost loved ones who were often murdered outright by their white captors for the scalp bounty.

Captain Samuel House was chosen as the meeting place for treating with the Indians requested by Chief of Cherokees held at Catawba Town and Broad River in March, 1756.

My 6th great grandfather was the first white man to discover Cumberland Gap , He was the Mediator between the Indians and the early Virginia government. At the request of Samuel who represented the Holston Settlement in his conference his request to build the Stockade was built at Dunkards bottom on the New River and Davis Bottom at headquarters of Middle Fork on the Holston.

Samuel was the first White man to hunt explore Kentucky way before Boone.

There is also a historical marker Farthest West on behalf of Samuel. He was a friend of the Indians and he traded often with them.